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Mohawk Girls is being marketed as Sex and the City aboriginal-style. But that billing may be reductive.

Canadian viewers have been trained to expect less from low-budget, well-meaning CanCon. Yet Mohawk Girls abides by the glossy standards of Hollywood while remaining true to its more humble documentary roots as an exploration of identity. It is a slickly produced package that looks at issues of racism, sexuality and culture in a frank and oftentimes subversive way that would not be out of place on edgier cable.

The show, which debuts on OMNI Sunday and on APTN Tuesday, centres on four young women dealing with life on “The Rez.”

There are scenes looking at racism (“I can’t date a white guy, those are the rules”) to inbreeding on the reservation (“I’m not having troll babies with my second cousin”) to the decline of the male stock (“How are we supposed to rebuild the Mohawk nation if every guy is a butterhead?”).

One of the main characters gets told one too many times she is “lucky” she doesn’t have to pay taxes as an aboriginal. She finally explodes: “You guys got the best rental deal in history. You’re the lucky ones,” she tells a clueless pickup artist. And you can feel an entire nation cheering her on.

“When we were doing the writing we were all holding our breath a little. Are we going too far? Will this make it on network TV?” says creator Tracey Deer in an interview.

Deer, whose roots are in documentary, says she expects pushback from viewers,

“I think there is a tendency in the community to say it’s our business, it’s private, or don’t give them more ammo against us. But let’s talk about controversial issues, not hide it,” she says. “And other (non-aboriginal) viewers might not like everything we have to say either.”

As a young native woman, Deer seldom saw herself reflected in the TV of her youth. So she made her own.

Much of the show is autobiographical. Deer grew up on a Mohawk reservation and faced the same issues that her characters do. Her documentary producer experience grounds the show, which is essentially a sitcom but falls in that netherworld between comedy and drama.

The four women are all aspects of Deer: there is Bailey (Jenny Pudavick), who wants to be the perfect Mohawk; Caitlin (Heather White), the flirt who fights low self-esteem; Zoe (Brittany LeBorgne), the type A careerist; and Anna (Maika Harper), the newcomer who breaks the rules.

“These are very real girls. They are four different versions of myself, but I’ve pushed them to make them more extreme,” says Deer. “This is the age where you’re still confused. It has all the crazy stuff in my life, that my sister, my cousins, my friends all dealt with.”

Two of the women, LeBorgne and White, are Mohawk. In fact, Deer was their camp counsellor when she was 17.

“I remember as a teenager telling them I’m going to make a TV show and they’re going to star in it,” says Deer. “And then we started shooting it all those years later. This has been a real journey for everyone.”

After graduating high school, Deer enrolled in Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she graduated with a degree in film studies.

Her TV series is based on the 2005 documentary of the same name in which Deer spent two years chronicling the lives of three teenage girls in the Kahnawake Mohawk community outside Montreal. She won a Gemini Award for her 2008 documentaryClub Native, which looked at Mohawk identity.

But she felt she still had stories to tell and fiction was the best way to get the message out. She wrote a short 15-minute scripted film and then started shopping the concept.

“Aboriginal life is fraught with very difficult issues. There’s no way to remove that. But I also think in just dealing with that you will find aboriginal people have the best sense of humour because we are going through so much trauma,” says Deer. “And fiction is so freeing. I get to make every single decision right down to the salt shakers on the table. It’s a world of control. And for a control freak like myself, it’s incredibly satisfying to see this world come alive.”

It wasn’t the easiest road. Even by the fickle standards of television, Mohawk Girls has had a particularly long gestation.

The original pilot was shot five years ago. And then reshot when one of the actors decided not to continue. After getting picked up, Season 1’s seven episodes were filmed two years ago. And then broadcasters APTN and OMNI decided to hold off for another year. In the interim, they made another six episodes. Which essentially means seasons 1 and 2 will premiere as one season.

Deer says finding a voice for natives in mainstream media has never been an easy path.

And she’s still trying to navigate the personal and the professional. Like her groundbreaking documentaries, and now Mohawk Girls, Deer has made a career out of exploring identity, although she is still trying to figure out what that means.

“You have everyone from friends to colleagues and my opinionated cousin telling me what we should stand for,” says Deer. “I think this show is about figuring it out, but to not box ourselves in. It’s time to get out of the box.”

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